Almost three years before the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution, on July 21st 1905, residents of Istanbul, state officials, foreign dignitaries, and tourists had gathered in Be?ikta? for the highly ritualized Friday prayer service, one of the few occasions the sultan Abdülhamid II could be seen in public. A massive explosion shook the square prior to the sultan’s ‘traditional’ ride back to his palace, killing instantly twenty-six people including civilians and members of the imperial guard. The sultan survived the attempt on his life unscathed due to a prolonged conversation with his ?eyhülislam at the gates of the mosque. The subsequent investigation into the matter revealed a detailed plan by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in collaboration with the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and a Belgian anarchist to set off a number of spectacular explosions throughout the Ottoman capital as well as Izmir and Salonica. By focusing on the failed assassination attempt, which has often been treated as a side note in the historiography of the Hamidian period or Armenian nationalism, this paper will examine the organizational dynamics of the strand of revolutionary violence directed at symbols of the existing social-political order in the Ottoman Empire as part of the multi-faceted opposition to the Hamidian regime. It will also be situated within the context of the growing popularity of the “propaganda by the deed” in the previous decade which was marked by the assassination of heads of state and high-ranking government officials in the Russian Empire, the United States, France, Spain, and Italy. The government’s response to the proliferation of revolutionary networks in urban centers, and its concerted efforts to frame their suppression as part of a pan-European struggle against Anarchism will also be taken into account.